One Lucky Pair“Ejim is my good luck charm,” Andrea shares. “The weeks leading to the serendipitous moment we met were pretty overwhelming.” That’s no exaggeration. At the time she met Ejim, Andrea was a recent graduate without a job living in a tiny New York City apartment and completely down on her luck. Things were so bad she ‘d contemplated moving back home to Minnesota. Then one day everything changed when she met Ejim at a friend’s “otherwise forgettable” party. They struck up a conversation that led to a friendly debate and eventually exchanged phone numbers. Ejim and Andrea were inseparable then, and even though she was later kicked out of her apartment and wound up with a crappy job, she says, none of it affected her like it had before. She was on cloud nine with Ejim.

“Eventually things started to turn around for me, and I really owe it all to Ejim,” Andrea tells us. “He has been my rock, my support network, and my number one fan. Now I feel like the luckiest woman in the world because soon I will call that handsome gentleman, my husband.”

Andrea wasn’t the only one head over heels in love.

“By then, I knew that I wanted this sweet-natured, arrestingly beautiful woman who shared my passion for bacon and pinkberry, to be my wife one day,” Ejim says.

Destination LoveAndrea goes to Egypt for the first two months of every year to unearth and analyze ancient artifacts, which gave Ejim a tremendous amount of time to think about how he would propose to his lady love. Usually these trips meant Andrea would miss Valentine’s Day, but in 2010 Ejim got the news that she’d be home early in time to celebrate with him that year.

He planned to whisk her away to Charleston, South Carolina, where she grew up, and propose in a honeymoon suite overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. While she was away he went to visit her father and ask for permission, and bought her a dress and shoes to wear on the special night. The day they were leaving for South Carolina the weather was terrible and as their plane sat on the runway they learned the flight was cancelled. Ejim was disappointed, but quickly realized the only other place that had special significance for Andrea was Paris. So he booked the next available flight, and thirty-six hours later he gave her the best Valentine’s Day gift ever.

“After talking her into going to the Eiffel Tower before Valentine’s day dinner and waiting in the cold for an hour before finally making it into the highest point in Paris, I nervously handed a startled tourist my camera and urgently whispered ‘start taking as many pictures as possible,’” Ejim recalls. “I got down on one knee and surprised the hell out of Andrea. And she said yes!”